One of the reasons why the HD release of the Silent Hill collection was so difficult to make, was that it was based on buggy archived code, said Tomm Hulett, Senior Associate Producer in charge of the project. Ten years ago, a lot of game companies, including Konami, thought they'd never have to refer to old code again once the game shipped, he explained. They didn't preserve the finished code, just the half-polished version, written before final release.

"During debug," Hulett recalled, "we didn't just have to deal with the expected 'porting' bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we'd never seen.

"I think at one point Heather [from Silent Hill 3] was blue."

In the end, these bugs meant it took as long to put together the collection as it did to make Silent Hill 2. "Now," Hulett hopes, "it's clear that having all that data in an easy-to-manage format is important."

Porting from the old code did, however, throw up some unusual data: old textures and artwork from the original release that, thanks to lack of graphical clarity, had never before been seen on consoles. For Hulett, adding these puzzle clues and extras was a pleasant bonus.

That said, Hulett, a huge Silent Hill fan, has now gone through the collection fired with "righteous indignation," documenting every problem he could find. The result? A ton of fixes to work on. Good luck to them. One thing to be thankful for: These days, most problems can be fixed with a patch download.

I learned the same lesson doing graduate research. Write down everything, save everything in multiple formats, because you'll have to package all that old work and writing into a thesis someday, even though it seems so far away...

I was wondering the same thing, and I can't take anything that guy says seriously. Especially after when the bugs were first found in the game and the "patch" was sent.

All in all, it just makes them sound lazy.

It probably has to do with the fact that MGS HD was done by Bluepoint who had a good track record with Ico/Shadow of the Colossus HD and God of War HD.

Now maybe it's because Bluepoint was busy with MGS HD, but unfortunately Konami decided to give Silent Hill to a bunch of people who obviously couldn't handle it.

You're probably right, and I believe it's going to be the same people that are making Book of Memories as well. This whole thing was a trainwreck from the beginning, and that makes me sad because Silent Hill deserves better than this.

Kheapathic:My guess is that while Silent Hill and Metal Gear are both Konami franchises, Metal Gear Solid is Kojima's baby. I'm pretty positive Kojima wanted a certain standard before anything got sent out.

Could be.

All the while nobody of the original Team Silent was quality checking the HD transfer for Silent Hill.

Fiz_The_Toaster:You're probably right, and I believe it's going to be the same people that are making Book of Memories as well. This whole thing was a trainwreck from the beginning, and that makes me sad because Silent Hill deserves better than this.

The thing is that the original team was already kinda done with this series come Silent Hill 4. The only way I ever see a proper Silent Hill sequel happening is if it's a parody featuring only aliens, flying saucers, and shiba inu dogs.

Fiz_The_Toaster:You're probably right, and I believe it's going to be the same people that are making Book of Memories as well. This whole thing was a trainwreck from the beginning, and that makes me sad because Silent Hill deserves better than this.

The thing is that the original team was already kinda done with this series come Silent Hill 4. The only way I ever see a proper Silent Hill sequel happening is if it's a parody featuring only aliens, flying saucers, and shiba inu dogs.

Yeah, I was done by the time SH:Origins came out and then finding out that Team Silent wasn't going to be making Silent Hill games anymore. That was a sad day for me. :(